---
title: "Operations at Level 3 | Grafana Labs"
description: "Alerting, SLOs, and investigation for transactions"
---

> For a curated documentation index, see [llms.txt](/llms.txt). For the complete documentation index, see [llms-full.txt](/llms-full.txt).

## Transaction-level operations

At Level 3, alerting works at the **aggregate level** — percentiles, error rates, and SLOs. Traces are for investigation after an alert fires, not the source of the alert itself.

### Alerting

| What to alert on    | Example                                                  |
|---------------------|----------------------------------------------------------|
| Latency percentiles | P99 latency > 2s for payment flow across all users    |
| Span error rates    | Database span error rate > threshold                  |
| SLO burn rate       | Critical path success rate burning error budget too fast |

### SLOs

| SLO type              | Example                                     |
|-----------------------|---------------------------------------------|
| Transaction success   | 99% of checkout flows complete successfully |
| Critical path latency | 95% of payment transactions < 1s         |
| End-to-end latency    | 90% of user journeys < 3s total          |

### Dashboards

| Dashboard type       | What you see                                |
|----------------------|---------------------------------------------|
| Trace analysis       | Span breakdown, latency distribution        |
| Flame graphs         | Where code spends time (profiling)          |
| Frontend performance | Core Web Vitals, user experience metrics    |
| AI/LLM metrics       | Token usage, model latency, prompt analysis |

### Investigation

| Tool                  | How you use it at Level 3                    |
|-----------------------|----------------------------------------------|
| **Trace Explorer**    | Search traces by attributes, find slow spans |
| **Trace-to-logs**     | Jump from trace span to related logs         |
| **Trace-to-profiles** | See code-level performance for a trace       |
| **Session replay**    | Watch what the user actually experienced     |

* * *

**At Level 4, you’ll alert on custom metrics and KPIs.**